About a year and a half ago, I moved all my art content from an old website onto this one. A lot has happened since then, and I decided this fall that it was time to circle back around and create a separate site dedicated to my art and the whole mess of personal stuff that goes with it. Here it is: Zero Point Mechanic. 

I've spent a lot of my free time since the end of the semester assembling and "organizing" content. I didn't want to spend the time trying to explain everything, so I decided that I would explain nothing. If you've read any of the stories about my art, you know that a lot of it is about interacting with memories. I created the new website as a vehicle that would both help me do that and provide a place to display pictures of my work. I didn't really know how I would group things until I started to do it. It's both strange and comforting seeing patterns in what I've been interested in, fascinated with, and bothered by, stretching back to my childhood. 

I've only had a digital camera since about 2005 -- less than a third of my life. There is a lot more content that will come from the boxes (and boxes, and boxes) of printed photographs, audio, video, and personal artifacts that I've got in my closet and attic. The website is a work in progress and probably always will be.

As it says on the homepage, if you want to see pictures of recent work, visit the Gallery. Each image there leads to a separate page for the piece, usually with images taken "in progress." When I write about my art, I still plan on doing it on this blog. Blog posts are linked as screenshots of the title.

The Sketchbook section is probably the best portal to start exploring, if you're so inclined. Clicking on many of the sketches will lead you elsewhere, and so on and so on. At this point there are links I have yet to establish, and there may be whole sections that don't link to anything yet. That will change as I have time to develop the site further.  

People are hugely important to my memories. I have tried to err on the side of not including recognizable images of other people, however, because I wasn't sure that they would always like it. My goal isn't to make anyone mad, but to provide myself with some memory cue cards. So if you see a picture of yourself and you'd like it removed, just let me know. 

​Enjoy!

It's the shortest day of the year, so I'm going to write one of my shortest blog posts of the year: I learned yesterday that "Beauty and Grace" has a place in ArtFields 2018. As I wrote in November, the piece is easily the most ambitious visual art project I have ever undertaken. I'm very happy that it will move from my driveway to somewhere people can see it. I hear Lake City, SC, is beautiful in April.

If you've discarded metal junk on the curbs of Shandon, Hollywood/Rose Hill, or Rosewood in the past year or given me stuff, chances are fair that some of your trash made its way into this piece. If I listed everything this would turn into one of my longest blog posts of the year. Thanks for your support, intentional or otherwise.

I have several months to figure out how to get the components onto a truck/trailer, safely moved down the highway, and re-assembled. I may need to contrive a contraption. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, here's a picture of me and "Beauty" and a pair of videos from the concerts that bookended this adventure (Against Me! in Wilmington, NC, and Foo Fighters in Columbia). Enjoy!

'Tis that season again, Swordgate fans! My academic semester ended on Friday with a week of grading projects, giving final exams, submitting final grades, doing my annual report, filling out various kinds of paperwork, and burrowing as deeply into my overdue email inbox as I could before I ran out of energy. Just as on that fateful day two years ago, I've put the archaeology aside for the holidays to focus on helping kids make Christmas presents and getting the house ready for relatives.

In 2015, I was sweeping the kitchen floor when I became aware of the "news" about the Roman sword claim. The real news, of course, wasn't that a history-changing artifact had been discovered but that its "100% confirmed" proponent had condensed his credibility into one easily evaluated claim and teed it up. Many of you are familiar with the twists and turns of what happened next (if not, I refer you to this page of blog posts). The sword saga has produced an amazing amount of fun for almost all involved.

​While it is still not over (there have been several more Fake Hercules Sword sightings this semester that I haven't written about, and we still don't know exactly when and where these things were first produced), it seems worthwhile to use this second anniversary to reflect on a few numbers that are relevant to the whole debacle. Thanks to Peter de Geus for compiling many of these. If you have suggestions for numbers that mark this important milestone, please leave them in the comments and I'll add the good ones to this post.

We strive for accuracy. Please communicate errors and corrections to the Swordgate Office of Dispute Resolution.

Enjoy!​

100: Percentage certainty attached to the original "Roman sword" claim;

52: Approximate number of individual items, artifacts, or features J. Hutton Pulitzer alleges to exist on or around Oak Island that are Roman, Minoan, or Phoenician;

730: days since Pulitzer announced the Roman sword "white paper" that would be published by the Ancient Artifact Preservation Society (AAPS);

unknown: number of days since information about the coming "white paper" disappeared from the AAPS website;

0: number of Roman sword "white papers" produced by Pulitzer and/or the AAPS;

80: approximate number of pages of copy-paste content in the "sword report;"

35: percentage of zinc in the purportedly "Roman" sword;

0: number of tables in the "sword report" that actually show the elemental composition (in percentages) of the claimed "Roman sword' as collected by Pulitzer (the legendary XRF data);

2: number of claims that the "sword report" was peer reviewed;

>25: number of Hercules-hilted swords that have been "discovered" since the "Roman sword" claim;

16: number of different materials that Pulitzer has claimed the "fake" swords were made of (base metals, cast iron, ceramic, cheap replica materials, fake rock, fake stone, man-made stone painted in bronze, man-made stone painted with bluish paint, manufactured stone,pewter, pig iron, plastic, plastic or resin painted green, synthetic stone, synthetic stone painted in a patina color, wood);

0: number of known Hercules-hilted swords made of anything but copper alloys or iron;

26: minimum number of defunct websites or social media pages created and abandoned by sword proponent over the last two years;

9: number of dollars per month apparently still being contributed to the Solomon's Secret Pre Oder site on Patreon; 

5: number of minutes I expect that Patreon site to still be live after I publish this blog post;
​
unknown: number of videos about the sword claim taken down by sword proponents;

37: number of months since the Solomon's Secret pre-order was available;

16: number of months since the July 2016 Solomon's Secret expected ship date was announced;

0: number of copies of Solomon's Secret known to have shipped;

lost count: number of times I've been threatened with legal action during the sword debacle;

almost 2: number of years that have passed since I pointed out that the "Roman shield boss from Nova Scotia" pictured in the Daily Mail is actually in the British Museum;

7:  The number of military and commercial air insignia on the TreasureForce Commander's "uniform;"

0: number of graves of giants that Pulitzer and Scott Wolter have excavated;

705: number of dollars publicly raised to fight the Swordgate war;

many: things we've left out.

0: Percentage chance remaining that the "Roman sword" is an ancient Roman artifact;

almost 1: number of months that passed between the original "Roman sword" claim and its spread around the internet and a reaction by real journalists in the real media.

I will be forever proud of what this blog accomplished in the month between the original "Roman sword" claim and the materialization of any reaction by the real media.Confronted with an item of fake news that was rapidly gaining traction, we used the properties of the internet to generate new empirical data that could be used to evaluate the claim and construct an alternative hypothesis that was consistent with all lines of information. By the time journalists began writing about the story, the actual question of the authenticity of the sword had already been mostly addressed.

The interplay between the top-town and bottom-up effects were fascinating to watch and great fun to participate in. Swordgate remains one of the most epic, successful, crowd-sourced efforts at addressing pseudo-archaeology online that I have ever seen. It's a model of what can be done.

​Thank you to all that became involved. I hope you enjoy the second anniversary of Swordgate with a well-earned sense of satisfaction. Give yourself a pat on the back, keep your eyes open, and keep your fingers crossed that we'll know even more of the story by the third anniversary.

I haven't had a whole lot of time for art this semester. I've had some, obviously (I finished "Beauty and Grace" and "My Father's Hammer"), but not as much as I would like. It's been a busy fall. The fever pace is starting to break, though, with just one week of classes left, SEAC over, and my wife's shop open (more on that later). So I've been able to get back to my workshop this weekend and last weekend. I need to spend more time out there to dissuade the Carolina wrens from building nests in things -- such as dinosaurs -- that I'm going to need to move. They've even been probing inside the garage when it's open. Love is in the air.

Last May after my Afterburner show originally opened at Tapp's, I had the time and energy to make several more pieces and get them into the "extended" show in June. One of the things I sent was an unfinished piece called "Sun Gun." It was a cawing crow perched on the tail fins of a rocket. I knew it wasn't done but I wasn't sure why. So it's been sitting my garage since the summer.

I made the original piece quickly, shortly after the death of Chris Cornell. Few celebrity deaths hit me like his did (I wrote a bit about it here). Anyway, his death was on my mind and his music was in my ears while I was working on "Sun Gun." The body of the crow is built to show a forward-facing gear under the neck that reminded me of the cover of Badmotorfinger.

The short version of the story is that I meant for the piece to be about fearlessness, arrogance, exploration, and vulnerability. No good fighter gets into the ring thinking there is a snowball's chance he'll lose. Neil Armstrong and Alan Shepard played golf on the moon. I've always been fascinated by that scene in 1902's A Trip to the Moon where the rocket hits the moon in the eye: the Victorians don't just land on the moon, they shoot themselves into it. The first line of "Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart" is "Every time I stare into the sun" but it also sounds like "stab into the sun." It's about again and again taking steps into the unknown that you already know is dangerous.

Anyway, the crow of the unfinished version of "Sun Gun" had the right posture but was entirely too flimsy. In a race to keep moving, I used thin sheet metal and not much of it. I only just figured out that it was the crow itself that bothered me. Up until two days ago I was still thinking about how to change the base to make it more attractive. At one point I had even concocted plans for an elaborate mechanical contraption to rotate the base through a path mimicking the total eclipse we experienced here in August. I wasn't excited about any of those ideas (which I now understand was because they were wrong), so "Sun Gun" sat in the back of the garage.

My unhappiness with it finally turned into action when I realized it was the crow that needed work, not the base. I had all the materials I needed to puff it up the way it should be: more grit, more bulk, more moxy. Saw blades, rusty rods, a carving knife, old hinges . . . I used cut nails and pieces of a drain snake from the same stock as I used on "My Father's Hammer," which I like because it adds some resonance between them.

Finishing this feels like putting a piece into a puzzle that you couldn't place before because you were holding it upside down: fitting that piece in not only takes care of that piece, but opens the way for what's next.

​Here are some pictures. There are a few more on this page.